Tissue products, such as facial tissues, paper towels, bath tissues, napkins, and other similar products, are designed to include several important properties. For example, the products should have good bulk, a soft feel, and should have good strength and durability. Unfortunately, however, when steps are taken to increase one property of the product, other characteristics of the product are often adversely affected.
To achieve the optimum product properties, tissue products are typically formed, at least in part, from pulps containing wood fibers and often a blend of hardwood and softwood fibers to achieve the desired properties. Typically when attempting to optimize surface softness, as is often the case with tissue products, the papermaker will select the fiber furnish based in part on the coarseness of pulp fibers. Pulps having fibers with low coarseness are desirable because tissue paper made from fibers having a low coarseness can be made softer than similar tissue paper made from fibers having a high coarseness. To optimize surface softness even further, premium tissue products usually comprise layered structures where the low coarseness fibers are directed to the outside layer of the tissue sheet with the inner layer of the sheet comprising longer, coarser fibers.
Unfortunately, the need for softness is balanced by the need for durability. Durability in tissue products can be defined in terms of tensile strength, tensile energy absorption (TEA), burst strength and tear strength. Typically tear, burst and TEA will show a positive correlation with tensile strength while tensile strength, and thus durability, and softness are inversely related. Thus the paper maker is continuously challenged with the need to balance the need for softness with a need for durability. Unfortunately, tissue paper durability generally decreases as the fiber length is reduced. Therefore, simply reducing the pulp fiber length can result in an undesirable trade-off between product surface softness and product durability.
Besides durability long fibers also play an important role in overall tissue product softness. While surface softness in tissue products is an important attribute, a second element in the overall softness of a tissue sheet is stiffness. Stiffness can be measured from the tensile slope of stress-strain tensile curve. The lower the slope the lower the stiffness and the better overall softness the product will display. Stiffness and tensile strength are positively correlated, however at a given tensile strength shorter fibers will display a greater stiffness than long fibers. While not wishing to be bound by theory, it is believed that this behavior is due to the higher number of hydrogen bonds required to produce a product of a given tensile strength with short fibers than with long fibers. Thus, easily collapsible, low coarseness long fibers, such as those provided by northern softwood kraft (NSWK) fibers typically supply the best combination of durability and softness in tissue products when those fibers are used in combination with hardwood Kraft fibers such as Eucalyptus hardwood Kraft fibers. While Northern Softwood Kraft Fibers have a higher coarseness than Eucalyptus fibers their small cell wall thickness relative to lumen diameter combined with their long length makes them the ideal candidate for optimizing durability and softness in tissue.
Unfortunately supply of NSWK is under significant pressure both economically and environmentally. As such, prices of NSWK have escalated significantly creating a need to find alternatives to optimize softness and strength in tissue products. Alternatives, however, are limited. For example, southern softwood kraft (SSWK) may only be used in limited amounts in the manufacture of tissue products because its high coarseness results in stiffer, harsher feeling products than NSWK. Thus, there remains a need for an alternative to NSWK for the manufacture of premium tissue products, which must be both soft and strong.